December 30, 2010

... that popular Venn diagram with circles for prostitutes, doctors, and TSA agents and the "get paid to touch your junk" punchline in the center is not a proper Venn diagram, as brilliantly and amusingly explained by Rich Skrenta (via Techdirt).

13 comments:

Well, it was a Venn diagram in the same sense that the New Yorker's cover showing the US as some vague place west of the Hudson was a map. Both made their point graphically, if not strictly cartographically (Venno-graphically?).

The unlabeled center of his chart? That's easy - extend any of the three 2-group overlaps, and see if it makes any sense.

Doctors who require very little training? Not in the U.S.; maybe Cuba? Maybe Africa?

TSA agents who make more per hour than you make in a day? TSA isn't a California municipality, so that's not happening. (Unless "you" are unemployed.)

Prostitutes who wear blue latex gloves? Probably not your ordinary prostitute, but there are prostitutes catering to most fetishes, and surely there are enough people with medical (or TSA) fetishes to support prostitutes who use blue latex gloves.

The author of the linked article is actually Andrew Plotkin. I dislike the practice of crediting the hat-tipper in the same sentence as the author, as Techdirt did here, because it makes it easy to mix them up.

To aid my oral argument in appellate practice class, I used a Venn Diagram to visually "locate" pertinent case law within the separate and overlapping coverages of the Road Defect Statute and the state Tort Claims Act.

My professor, who's now on the appeals court, thought it was innovative use of Venn Diagram to aid oral argument.

Her husband, who was sitting as judge, basically said he didn't know what the fuck the diagram meant.

It taught me a valuable lesson: a judge will hold you responsible for his lack of analytical skills that probably visted him upon the legal profession in the first place.